In the online search environment today, users often conduct searches designed to elicit information about a particular entity. An “entity,” as the term is utilized herein, is an instance of an abstract concept or object, including, for instance, a person, an event, a location, a business, a movie, and the like. Entities include attributes associated therewith (e.g., a date of birth or city of birth associated with a person entity, or a manufacturer or color associated with an entity such as a piece of furniture), each attribute having an associated value. Entities also include relationships to other entities (e.g., a person entity may have a relationship with another person entity that is a spouse of the person entity, or a furniture item entity may have a relationship with other furniture item entities having the same manufacturer or style as the furniture entity).
Entity-attribute pairs are received from various content feeds. Often, more than one content feed contains entity-attribute pairs about the same entity. However, as the content feeds are not always provided utilizing a common schema, determining that an entity-attribute pair from one content feed—or even an entity itself—is the same as an entity or entity-attribute pair received from another content feed is often a difficult task. Complicating the issue is the fact that a value associated with a particular entity-attribute pair from two different content feeds may not be the same, begging an answer to the questions of not only whether the two sources of content are related to the same entity but also which one is correct.